Innovations in Language Learning: The Oregon Chinese Flagship Model

Language learning in the United States suffers from a culture of low expectations. Lacking bilingual role models around them, students often view language class as, at best, a way to become a tourist in a country with a language different from their own. Monolingual policymakers assume that learning another language fluently is impossible and inconsequential, since they themselves are capable professionals with one language. Educators, discouraged by years of inadequate funding and support, have come to hope for nothing more than incremental improvements. The National Flagship Language Program (NFLP) aims to break this cycle of low expectations and low results by providing funding to institutions willing to accept the challenge of producing Superior (Level 3) language users through a radical re-engineering of the language learning enterprise. The need for fundamental change in language education is longstanding, but the events of September 11 brought the importance of this need to the awareness of national policymakers. Due to the emphasis of critical languages, responsibility for carrying out this fundamental re-examination of language learning has fallen to those engaged in the less commonly taught languages.